The Village Voice has called her work "enormously powerful, alternately voluptuous and frenetic." maura nguyễn donohue has spent over 30 years as one of New York City's most distinctive voices in avant-garde dance performance — as a choreographer, curator, producer, and advocate for the art form. She is now Chair of Dance at Hunter College, one of the city's leading public colleges.

Born in Vietnam, maura's reach extends well beyond New York. She's taken her work across the US, Europe, and Asia — and from 1999 to 2004, she served as artistic advisor for Dance Theater Workshop's Mekong Project, a Rockefeller Foundation-backed initiative that brought US choreographers into creative exchanges with artists in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

In this conversation, we get into her beginnings, what it meant to find her voice as a Vietn ...